Market Basket kerfuffle leaves Bourne residents shopping elsewhere

Thursday

Aug 7, 2014 at 1:13 PMAug 7, 2014 at 1:19 PM

Demoulas family corporate feuding continued last week, making Market Basket stores – including the one in Sagamore off Route 6 – supermarket-shopping dead zones, arguably bad news for food shoppers in search – or need - of lower prices.

Paul Gately

Demoulas family corporate feuding continued last week, making Market Basket stores – including the one in Sagamore off Route 6 – supermarket-shopping dead zones, arguably bad news for food shoppers in search – or need - of lower prices.

The Tewksbury-based chain ordered its striking middle-level mangers back to work Monday, promising layoffs otherwise and desperately hoping to load delivery trucks and stock stores that have gone empty - for the most part - of perishable items over two weeks.

Bourne food shoppers are in limbo again; that is, they’re returning to other venues.

Many are heading back to Stop & Shop stores out of town, notably those last weekend in Sandwich at Route 6A, Mashpee and Falmouth.

Saturday afternoon, during the rainy, traffic-clogged exodus of the Cape’s change-over weekend, found the Sandwich Stop & Shop at 6A busier than ever and its parking lot – for the first time in a long while – filled seemingly to capacity.

Shopping situations were similar at Stop & Shop in Mashpee and Falmouth. A sign at the checkout stations in Mashpee advertised job openings in all store sections, including the deli.

In some aisles of the Mashpee store, items could not be stocked fast enough to meet demand.

For Bourne shoppers, the highly publicized Market Basket melee about ownership and operational control means a return to dramatically higher food prices and treks to out-of-town stores, though the Pocasset Country Market at Barlows Landing Road is still a shopping mainstay.

But wider food-shopping patterns are altered again in Bourne, which featured no supermarket in town until Market Basket opened last year.

This unfolds similar to what evolved following the departure of the Grand Union store from the Clay Pond Road shopping plaza in Monument Beach five years ago. Stop & Shop now leases that space off MacArthur Boulevard but does not use it.